Tulane-Siena Institute past director and Tulane professor Glynn Lunney was called upon by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, and the Internet to provide perspective on a proposed change to copyright law.

Tulane Law Professor Herbert Larson and Siena Program Professor Colonel Matthew Bogdanos contribute to this New York Times article on a dispute between the Cambodian Government and Sotheby's over the manner in which a 250-pound statue left Cambodia, and whether it was legal or not.

NPR's Anthony Kuhn covers the ongoing legal battle between Cambodia and Sotheby's in this recent article. There is also an available link from the article to listen to the Story on NPR's segment, All Things Considered.

An aggressive campaign by Turkey to reclaim antiquities it says were looted has led in recent months to the return of an ancient sphinx and many golden treasures from the region’s rich past. But it has also drawn condemnation from some of the world’s largest museums, which call the campaign cultural blackmail.

When the Jewish Museum of Vienna was founded in 1988 it was entrusted with safeguarding the art, books and Judaica that survived the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate their owners. But now, 25 years later, the museum has acknowledged it may be in possession of hundreds of items that were looted during the war and not returned to the families who lost them. If most museums focus on protecting and displaying their collections, Jewish museums, according to Marc Masurovsky, a founder of the Holocaust Art Restitution Project, have a dual mission: to serve as custodians of a heritage and to research and return recovered objects.

The lending and borrowing of famous artworks is the essence of cultural exchange between museums in the United States and abroad. In recent years, though, American museum directors have come to fear that this safeguard has eroded, and that foreign museums, dreading entanglement in costly ownership battles, are more hesitant to make loans. So they have asked Congress to increase the security for global art swaps, causing an unexpected storm of protest from those who say it goes too far in blocking efforts by owners to recover looted treasures.

A few weeks ago the Metropolitan Museum of Art sent two of its top executives to Cambodia to resolve a thorny dispute: whether two pieces of ancient Khmer art that the museum has long prominently exhibited were the product of looting.In days they had their answer...

The genocide committed by Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge regime earns a place in Washington’s Holocaust Museum. For the first time in its 20-year history, the American museum was carrying out plans to add a display about the Cambodian nightmare to its story of the Holocaust.

The Association of Art Museum Directors has voted to strengthen rules requiring museums to publish pictures and information about antiquities they have acquired that might be subject to questions of looting.

Archaeologist and legal expert Tess Davis (CAS'04) talks about Sotheby's attempt to auction an ancient Cambodian statue that had been looted by the Khmer Rouge in 1972; and the statue's eventual return home.

Archaeologist and legal expert Tess Davis (CAS'04) talks about the illicit antiquities trade, and how the looting of archaeological sites in conflict zones goes to fund paramilitary groups and terrorist organizations.